Friday, September 01, 2017

Today in 1979, Pioneer 11 made its historic flyby of Saturn, humanity's first. While it got the first closeup images of the Saturnian system, it's images, such as this one showing the rings and a transiting Mimas, while interesting, were no match for the more spectacular images that the Voyagers returned of the Jovian system that year, and were quickly supplanted by the Voyager visits to Saturn in the coming years.

A close-up of Saturn, rings, and moons on encounter day

Due to trajectory constrains, Pioneer approached and receded from Saturn looking at the backlit side of the rings, something never seen from earth except briefly when the rings are nearly edge on during ring plane crossings. Thus its view was interesting but also unfamiliar.

Approaching Saturn (with Titan)

Receding from Saturn. Due to data rate constraints, only every other pixel was returned, hence the reduced quality.

Best view of the unlit side of the rings during approach

During closest approach, Pioneer briefly passed through the ring plane and back, in theory giving it a view of the sunlit side of the rings. Given the speed at which it was traveling and that it's scanning imager, which built up images one pixel at a time using the spin of the spacecraft, took a long time to assemble pictures, not much could be done with this. The instrument did have, however, a lower resolution mode that was for the purpose of polarization studies, which could only take very crude images (if they could be called that). It could, however, work fast enough to capture the fleeting view. Here is an example of one.

The daylit side of the rings in front of the panet, with the limb visible behind them.

These images can be built up into a pretty nifty model of the rings.

The day side of Saturn's rings using data from Pioneer 11 in polarization mode

While it is neither the view normally associated with Pioneer nor should it be, it brings us full circle, seeing a world and its rings in a more familiar way as it looked 38 years ago, the day we first stopped by its doorstep while, at the time of writing, we sit 14 days before our first long-term visitor becomes one with Saturn. After 1981, which marked three consecutive years with an encounter, it would be another 23 years before humanity returned with Cassini. Let's hope that our imminent absence is brief.

Friday, February 03, 2017

From the moment I first found out about the discovery of geysers erupting into space by NASA's Cassini mission, I began to wonder whether they had been detected before. Pioneer data is of insufficient quality to detect them, but Voyager definitely could have. I carefully examined all of the images targeting Enceladus, but the illumination angle wasn't ideal (very high phase, or backlit, images are best for this, but none of the available images were taken at such an angle). I came up empty handed and dropped project.

Flash forward to the New Horizons Pluto encounter in the summer of 2015. I was sitting in a plenary meeting and the high phase images of Pluto's atmosphere were being discussed for the first time. Later in the meeting, someone asked a question about serendipitous images that might contain Pluto's small moons. The next talk was particle and fields stuff that I didn't really understand, so my mind wandered, and it clicked - maybe Enceladus made a serendipitous appearance in some high phase Saturn images.

In the fall of 2016, I finally found time to work on this. While Voyager 2 had the better camera, due to a spacecraft anomaly, it was not taking pictures during the first few days after closest approach, so after a check to see if there was anything from right after it was recovered, I moved on to Voyager 1. I experimented with some imagery from a few days out to get familiar with its cameras under these conditions before beginning in earnest. This image of Saturn came from this effort.

Saturn from the Receding Voyager 1

As I searched through the dataset, a group of images stood out. They were taken on November 13, 1980, a day after closest approach. None of the Narrow Angle Camera images contained Enceladus, but eight of the Wide Angle Camera images did. They showed the small crescent and night time hemisphere illuminated in Saturnshine as only a few pixels across.

Cleaned raw image from the dataset used

I thoroughly calibrated, deconvolved, and stacked the images. After combining different subsets as well as the full set, I am confident in the detection of the plumes, just where they should be.

Enceladus from Voyager 1 on November 13, 1980. The right side is illuminated by the sun, the left by reflected light from Saturn, and the plume can be seen at the bottom

In my excitement at having at last had some success with this project,I quickly wrote an Lunar and Planetary Science Conference abstract, which can be read here. It gives more detail about how this dataset was handled.

Erupting Enceladus over Saturn on November 13, 1980

I plan to continue sifting through images to see if there are other datasets worth processing in that way. I plan to do similar work with other worlds as well. At the very least, this indicates Enceladus is indeed constantly erupting, extending the baseline back more than two decades.

About Me

I am a philosophy professor at Roane State Community College in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Planetary exploration has always been an interest of mine. You can follow me on twitter @tedstryk for the latest updates on my work.
Please note that since the processed images are copyrighted, they should not be reused without permission. If you are interested in using any of my work, please contact me at strykt(at)roanestate.edu or tedstryk(at)gmail.com (I avoided @ to make the addresses harder for spam bots to pick up).